


Guilty Emotions

by jujubiest



Series: Barrison One-Shots [2]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Age Difference, Barrison is...a little slashy but one-sided, Barry has complicated feelings, Canonical Character Death, Eobarry is father/son, Father-Son Relationship, Lots of Barry's thoughts about Eobard and Earth-2 Wells, M/M, Pre-Slash, mentioned only - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-16
Updated: 2015-11-16
Packaged: 2018-05-01 21:43:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5221991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jujubiest/pseuds/jujubiest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Barry didn’t think his feelings about Harrison Wells could get any more complicated than they were already, but like most seemingly impossible things, it turned out to be only a matter of when.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Guilty Emotions

Barry didn’t think his feelings about Harrison Wells could get any more complicated than they were already, but like most seemingly impossible things, it turned out to be only a matter of when.

He could still remember clearly what that name, that face, _used_ to mean to him, years before they ever met…before the lightning. Before he had any inkling that he would ever be anything more than Barry Allen, forensic scientist.

The name Harrison Wells stood for brilliance, innovation, discovery…he was the greatest contemporary mind in nearly every field he touched, leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of the world without ever breaking a sweat. He was Barry’s _hero,_ the man who was going to save the world with science, and one of the reasons Barry wanted to pursue the sciences in the first place. He’d attended every lecture he could get within ten feet of since high school, read that damn tome of an autobiography _twice._ He’d practically memorized parts of it.

That face…that name had been hope to him once upon a time.

And then Harrison Wells, his hero, had saved his life. He’d become more than just the distant, shining symbol, the kind of man Barry wanted to _be_ someday…he was a mentor. Even a friend. Barry could sometimes still hear the quiet, hypnotic rasp and rumble of that voice in his ear, guiding him, believing in him, pushing him to go faster. _Run, Barry. Run!_ Those words spurred him on to do things he never would have even imagined on his own, discover new uses for his powers. New ways to help people.

But then he’d found out it was all a lie. That their friendship, everything Barry thought was between them…it was all poisoned from the start. The man who killed his mother, who ruined his father’s life…had also _saved_ him. The man who taught him the meaning of grief and the man who taught him how to be a hero…they were one and the same.

And he hated him. Oh, Barry _hated_ him like he had never hated anyone. He didn’t even know if he’d understood the feeling that word described until that moment, looking through the glass at Thawne’s stolen face and listening to him talk about killing Nora Allen like one might recount the banal details of a nice weekend they spent at the beach. He hated him for killing her, and for lying, and most of all for being Harrison Wells—the man Barry had put all his faith in for _months._

He felt like an idiot, like he should have seen it from the start. It was so _easy,_ looking back now, to recall all the little moments that should have added up to the truth. It was so easy to see how he’d been played, so easy to blame himself for not seeing through the lies now that he knew the truth. How could he have trusted so blindly?

That was, perhaps, the thing he hated him for more than anything else: for breaking his ability to trust, not in others, but in his own judgment of them.

And he didn’t know how to deal with all of that, because in spite of everything, a part of him still loved and admired the man Harrison—Eobard Thawne—had pretended to be. Harrison Wells had done a lot of good in his quest to do evil, and that paradox kept Barry up at night more often than he cared to admit. He wished, more than anything, that that man had been real for even a moment.

He tried to separate them in his mind: Harrison Wells and Eobard Thawne. He _knew,_ intellectually, that they were different people. He just had trouble making himself feel it. Harrison Wells, he reminded himself almost daily, was just another of Thawne’s many victims. By all accounts, he had been a genuinely good man: brilliant, kind, generous…exactly the kind of person Barry could have loved and looked up to, someone who would have deserved all those guilty emotions he now held, try as he might, toward Eobard Thawne.

Over and over, he called up the last memory he had of the man: a blonde, square-jawed stranger whose mouth had the same arrogant twist he knew so well, but whose eyes were the wrong shade of blue. He tried directing all of his anger and hatred toward _that_ man, and pushed the other things—all those moments of trust and comfort, all that hero-worship, all that love—away, toward a familiar face whose true owner he never knew. And at the same time, he tried to imagine that the Wells he had known and trusted was _that_ man, someone Eobard Thawne had killed. Sometimes it even worked. Most of the time, it just left Barry feeling nauseated, homesick and hollow, and strangely…cheated.

Because whether or not it was true, or fair, Harrison Wells’s face was the face he loved and hated. That other man, that other face, meant nothing to him. There were no feelings attached to him but a numb bereavement. It didn’t even feel like Thawne was really _gone_.

Whenever he imagined Thawne’s face changing, in those last moments before it disappeared, it was as though the real enemy had escaped him yet again, leaving another hapless victim to die in his place. He kept expecting the man to show up again, taunting him. He waited for that moment with a confusing combination of hope tangled up with dread.

So really, Barry wasn’t surprised at all when Harrison Wells stepped from Earth-2 and into their world.

It just proved that no matter how complicated his life was, there would always be something waiting in the wings to make yesterday’s complicated seem like today’s blessedly longed-for normal. This Harrison Wells threw Barry for a loop yet _again_ , and now he couldn’t seem to get his feet back under him.

It wasn’t just that this Wells also wore the face of his mother’s killer. It didn’t actually take Barry that long to spot tiny differences between them…the dour set of his mouth, the lack of heat behind his eyes, the subtle differences in his voice. After months of trying in vain to see something other than Thawne when he thought of Wells, suddenly here was this man who looked exactly like him yet couldn’t be more different. Between that and the man’s insistence on reminding them all that he and the other Wells were _not_ the same, it was hard to keep them locked together in his head, even if he’d wanted to try.

Of course, getting to know this Wells completely shattered his barely-minted attempts at a perception of the real Wells of their world—all those positive attributes he’d shuffled onto the ill-fated scientist just to cope—because the man was just…an unmitigated _ass_ from minute one.

It was astounding, how this Wells could actually be a father in another universe and display less paternal behavior in this one than the man who had taken both Barry’s parents from him. Wells’s—Thawne’s—attitude toward Barry, twisted as it was, had been undeniably fatherly. The man had practically been third in line in Barry’s seemingly ever-growing collection of father figures.

This Wells was prickly, stand-offish, off-putting. He criticized where Thawne would have corrected, insulted where Thawne would have encouraged. He yelled, which Thawne had almost never done. All-in-all, he was just, in the words of Cisco, a monumental dick.

But then…in a way, Barry preferred that.

Barry had felt as though he really _knew_ Thawne. He’d gone to great lengths to make Barry feel special, even chosen. In the end though, Thawne’s kindness had always been part of an agenda.

Barry hardly knew anything about this Harrison Wells, and that made him strangely fascinating. The thing he _did_ know was the man’s primary motive for helping him, and that put so many painful questions to bed right from the start, put his mind at ease in ways he didn’t even know he was tense.

He found himself lingering in the lab after hours with no real reason to be there, just looking over Wells’s shoulder, occasionally asking questions about whatever he was working on. The man never made him feel special…more like a nuisance, actually, but at least it was an honest antagonism.

And what did that say about him, that he actually found that refreshing? How low did a person’s bar have to be set to find “honestly an asshole” appealing as a personality type?

Still, the knowledge that his criteria for acceptable human interaction had plummeted down the tubes was never quite enough to keep him away for long. He’d make himself steer clear for a day, maybe two before he was pulled in the direction of S.T.A.R. Labs again, either by some new disaster or his own fascination. He told himself in the latter case that he was just being a good proprietor. After all, he owned the building…he should know what was going on there, it was his _responsibility._

Apparently, this excuse wasn’t enough to appease Wells’s annoyance at having his relative solitude invaded constantly, because sometime during the third week of this he turned abruptly in his chair and fixed Barry with a pointed glare through his glasses.

“I know subtlety is not one of your gifts, Barry, but if your intention was to hide your little crush I’m afraid you’re going to have to change tactics…or develop some in the first place.”

Barry froze like a deer in headlights, feeling the redness creeping up his neck and onto his face.

“I…I don’t…I mean I’m not…I…I mean—“

“Save it,” Dr. Wells interrupted, sounding pained but not a fraction as embarrassed as Barry felt. “You’re hardly the first eager young person to misplace their enthusiasm as some sort of…romantic attraction. Just do me a favor and stop…fluttering. It’s distracting.”

Barry made incoherent noises accompanied by fish faces for a few seconds more, before doing the only thing he could think to do in this situation: he sped out of there as fast as his legs could carry him.

Once he was alone at home, he collapsed onto the couch and dropped his head into his hands. Wells’s words were echoing over and over in his head, making his face burn anew with each repetition.

A crush. Was that what this was? Was that what he _felt?_

His racing heart answered his own question for him. A new set of guilty emotions for a brand-new Wells. As it turned out, there was literally no limit to how complicated his feelings towards Harrison Wells could get.

**Author's Note:**

> So this was something that I started writing stream-of-consciousness style on tumblr last night, when suddenly tumblr crashed and killed my post. I spent most of last night having a minor freakout before rewriting it, saving roughly every five seconds. I'm not as happy with this as I was with the original thing I wrote, but I think it got MOST of the emotions and thoughts I was trying to work with across. Just not as well as I wrote them the first time.
> 
> Long story short, I have never been so frustrated by any single piece of writing in my life so forgive me if this doesn't really...resonate.


End file.
